Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ with others in the same way that we use metaphors to compare and contrast the body of the world with the human body—speaking of the brow or foot of a hill, the head of a river, the eye of a storm. Analogies provide “objective correlatives” of our subjective states, and as such they carry us beyond ourselves. By likening moods to colors (blue for depression, red for anger, green for envy), to physical conditions (up or down, light or heavy, mobile or stuck), or to the weather (calm or stormy), we can grasp experiences that might otherwise be inexpressible and connect with others who share the same repertoire of images.

      There is always a risk, in making comparisons, of not finding in the other anything that bears comparison with what one can find in oneself. Confronted by what appears to be the unthinkable alterity of the other, or the uninhabitability of his or her lifeworld, one may retreat into one's own world and make it the measure of all things. This is the danger of the nonempirical philosophy against which Dewey rails. It suggests a loss of balance between the need to distance ourselves from a situation that proves too overwhelming to manage²⁰ and the need to engage with a situation in order to test our assumptions about it.

      This tension between evasion and engagement plays out in the way we think as well as the way we live.

      Just as there are many languages and dialectics in the world, so there are, within in any one social universe, numerous subsets of the lingua franca, comprising argots, jargons, idiolects, and restricted codes²¹ that effectively create closed communities. Although all these languages depend on analogies and metaphors (including logico mathematical and computer “languages”), people tend to assume that their preferred manner of speaking corresponds to a privileged field of experience that marks them out, not just as specialists but as special. Schizophrenia is an extreme example of this illusion, in which the conflation of words with things leads to the conviction that one's very life, if not the life of the world, depends on the making and maintaining of one's own “successful” arrangement of objects, images, numbers, and words.

      HOW WE THINK

      Our ways of representing the world to ourselves give us a consoling sense that the world is within our grasp, both cognitively and practically. But our representations tend to take on a life of their own. They are felt to possess the same concreteness as the experiences and processes to which they refer. Moreover, it is believed that some representations are better than others at capturing the exact nature of those experiences and processes. While common metaphors are often dismissed as amateurish or intellectually impoverished ways of spelling out the nature of the world about us, philosophical constructions allegedly provide superior pictures of that world, while mathematics captures its essence even more perfectly. These notions that there are superior and inferior ways of grasping the essence of reality tend to lose sight of the fact that different kinds of analogical thought serve different purposes, and that the only way we may know whether or not a particul ar mode of thought has value is to test it against the experience we are trying to make sense of. Thought is a tool, a technique, a distinctively human capacity for managing the vicissitudes of life. As such, it offers itself up to a speculative thinker like Newton as a way of comprehending the nature of what he will call “gravity” as much as to an Indonesian subsistence farmer working out how to make the most of a steep slope to irrigate his fields. Newton's model is not intrinsically superior to the farmer's model, since their problems are different, and the proof in either case can only be measured by the success with which the thinker, whatever mode of thought he or she deploys, solves the problem at hand. And while we tend to draw a distinction between concrete thinking, that serves “some end, good, or value beyond itself,” and abstract thinking, that serves “simply as a means to more thinking,” we should not rank one above the other but learn to judge when each is required.²² This pragmatist conclusion reminds one of Lévi-Strauss's insistence that scientific thought and nonscientific thought “require the same sort of mental operations” and differ “not so much in kind as in the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.”²³ At the same time, in both “science” and “magic” “the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.”²⁴ People classify and order plants, animals, objects, and persons not simply out of practical interest but because such bricological arrangements are potentially good to think with. For example, it is easier to think of the two moieties of a Western Australian Aboriginal people as both one and not one if the relationship is likened, say, to the relationship between eaglehawk and crow, since both are carnivorous birds, yet the first is predatory while the second is a scavenger.²⁵

      Our ability to grasp the world cognitively supplements our ability to grasp it practically and physically, which may explain why so many metaphors for thinking are drawn from bodily processes—grasping, understanding, seeing, comprehending, and knowing.²⁶ And it is typically when practical and physical modes of acting fail us that thought comes into its own. When we have difficulty understanding someone, we begin imagining what he or she might be trying to tell us. When we are physically disabled, we intensify efforts to think our way around the problem that we cannot solve by physical means alone. As Dewey notes:

      The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. Thinking is not a case of spontaneous combustion; it does not occur just on “general principles.” There is something specific which occasions and evokes it. General appeals to a child (or to a grown-up) to think, irrespective of the existence in his own experience of some difficulty that troubles him and disturbs his equilibrium, are as futile as advice to lift himself by his boot-straps.²⁷

      A corollary of Dewey's observation is that when life follows familiar routines and certain patterns, we give little thought to what we are doing or saying. Our behavior is habitual, not intellectual. It is when a routine is interrupted, when a calamity befalls us, when our expectations are not met, when a familiar person behaves out of character, and when we are suddenly unsure of our footing that we typically turn inward, thinking of a way out of or around the difficulty that has arisen. As Ed Tronick puts it, “when an impelling certitude is violated, it comes into awareness.” This is true from the first year of a child's life. Faced with a depressed, anxious, or emotionally unresponsive mother, a child's thoughts will become detached and take on a life of their own.²⁸ Instead of existing in relationship with the mother, the child learns to live within itself, thinking of the mother and of itself as separate, disconnected entities. In effect, the child compensates for the absence of a dyadic consciousness (in which mother and child collaboratively construct a coherent, mutually regulating neurological system) by developing isolated conceptions of self and others that may have pathological consequences. That is to say, when we cannot be a part of another's world, we are prone to think of ourselves as apart from it, and this may then deepen the estrangement unless we are helped back into the world from which we have withdrawn.

      In November 1932 Aldous Huxley began writing Eyeless in Gaza, a technically ambitious novel that was also autobiographical. After two years' work, Huxley was at an impasse. Not only was he unable to resolve the issues that plagued his protagonist and alter ego Anthony Beavis; Huxley was suffering from depression and insomnia. It was as if the general sense of dissociation, intellectual detachment, physical ungainliness, nearsightedness, and world weariness that had oppressed him from childhood now immobilized him completely. In the fall of 1935, on the advice of a friend, Huxley began daily consultations with the therapist F. M. Alexander. As a result, his health improved, his morale lifted, and he completed Eyeless in Gaza, writing into the text a doctor and self-styled “anthropologist” called James Miller whose practical philosophy transforms the life of the purblind “detached philosopher”²⁹ Anthony Beavis, just as Alexander “made a new and unrecognizable person”³⁰ of Aldous Huxley who, according to his wife, became a better man, more socially adroit and sensually engaged, and in “constructive conscious control of the self.”³¹ As Anthony Beavis explains this transformation, after rereading D. H. Lawrence's allegory of rebirth, The Man Who Died: “Thinking and the pursuit of knowledge—these were purposes for which he himself had used [his] energy…. Thought as an end, knowledge as an end. And now СКАЧАТЬ